An S&M story in the Bible?
How far will Samson and Delilah go?
In the story of Judges 16, a hero named Samson asks his woman to tie him up. I guess I hadn’t thought that was an S&M scene in the Bible?
I return to re-read Judges 16:6, and it does seem different than when I was a kid. Delilah says:“Tell me the secret of your great strength and how you can be tied up and subdued.”
Samson’s story has been badly misread.
Many Christians seem to think he’s a man with big muscles, sort of a like a biblical Hercules. But that’s not his story at all.
His story is all about his mother, who’d been visited by an angel, who seems to have impregnated her. The angel had disappeared in flames, and Samson will continue to be a solar force.
His name, Samson, derives from the mysterious feminine word shemesh, which means ‘sun’. The seven braids of his hair indicate the ancient idea of the seven rays of the sun.
When he’s in trouble, a divine power “rushes upon” him — and in sudden horror scenes he crushes his foes (Judges 14:6,19; 15:14).
It’s a problem for Samson as much as his enemies.
Samson is deeply affected by these scenes. He has “manic energy,” notes Gregory Mobley. “With Yhwh’s spirit beating in him, Samson is constantly restless and stirred up.”
We might think ahead to later stories that feature such language. As the “spirit of Yhwh began to trouble” Samson in Judges 13:25, the same ‘troubling’ occurs to many rulers (cf. Gen 41:8, Dan 2:3, Ps 77:4).
And Samson’s same ‘rushing’ of power and accompanying agitation is also found, in particular, in King Saul: “the Spirit of God came powerfully upon him, and he burned with anger” (1 Sam 11:6).
With this constant agitation, Samson can’t sleep. He takes a wife and never sleeps with her, so she’s married off to someone else. He stays with one prostitute (16:1), but is mostly at war, a divine and murderous force.
He seems to go to Delilah with a problem.
His powers have left him manic, insomniac, and crazed. It’s a disorder that originates in his ego. “I have killed a thousand men,” he says in 15:16. Dangerous language for a hero. Compare David in 1 Samuel 17:47:
“For the battle belongs to Yhwh . . .”
Samson is becoming burdened with a prideful spirit — as he then pursues Delilah — to break him down. She’s something like a dominatrix. But she’s his perfect match, his cosmic complement. As he’s the sun, her name is Hebrew and means ‘night’.
She goes to work, but the ropes she place on him burn off “like charred flax” as in 15:14, or incinerate as when “close to a flame” in 16:9.
A lot of scholars see an S&M theme.
“Their encounter can be seen as a kind of BDSM game,” suggests the scholar Marco Derks.
Jeremy Schipper goes through the evidence more reluctantly, but approaches the same conclusion. “Samson may interpret it as nothing more than part of a ‘love game’,” he says.
“Samson submits willingly to Delilah so she can tie him up, a classic bondage game,” says Lori Rowlett. “When he tired of winning every time, he delves into an act of deeper submission.”
Samson has to be broken down.
The process will end with him telling his deepest secret: the source of his power. It was told him by his mother.
Delilah goes to work, burrowing deeply into his psyche.
A psychoanalytic reading is possible. “Letting his hair be cut off is a way to let the bond with his mother be severed,” suggests Mieke Bal.
He’s like a man who has to let go of his mother, perhaps, in order to bond to a wife. Samson does seem to love Delilah—even as she’s punishing him.
“To free himself from his mother, he goes through symbolic death and rebirth in the arms of the Philistine other/mother,” says Francis Landy.
Delilah prompts and prompts him to tell her the secret.
Then she said to him, “How can you say, ‘I love you,’ when you won’t confide in me? This is the third time you have made a fool of me and haven’t told me the secret of your great strength.” With such nagging she prodded him day after day until he was sick to death of it. (16:15–16)
The word for ‘love’, in the Bible’s Greek translation, is agape.
In giving up his secret, he’s all but wanting to die.
A reading by Amy Kalmanofsky evokes this dark undercurrent: “Samson wants to die and thinks that the best way of doing so is at the hands of the Philistines.”
But in the Bible, where the Jesus drama is latent, to lose your life is to find it (Mt 10:39). Samson will become a more powerful weapon.
The cues anticipate the gospel drama. In Judges 16:16, Samson is “sick to death”—as Jesus, in Matthew 26:38 is “sorrowful unto death.”
Finally Samson tells her. He’s ready to be the sacrifice. And then he’s able to sleep.
There’s a deep divine logic at work.
God is moving against the Philistines. Samson’s power had been effective against crowds of people, but they were just pawns. What needs to be destroyed is the temple, for that’s where their god lives.
When he awakes, his head has been shaved. He seems to be raped by women in Genesis 26:8, though it’s translated “play.” The logic? The Philistines may think they can get a lot of little Samsons if he makes their women pregnant.
It seems to involve, as in v.21, the process of grinding grain. This would be amusing because it’s perceived as women’s work. “The sexual innuendo of the verb takes his ‘womanization’ one step further; in doing the woman’s work, he is not only ‘like a woman’, but like a sexually subdued woman,” suggests Ela Lazarewitz-Wrzykowska.
But this has deep theological meaning, for God likes feminine values.
“To be in relationship with God, Israel must assume a submissive position,” notes Amy Kalmanofsky. “In essence, Israel, like Samson, assumes a woman’s perspective, and by doing so, recognizes that God is the man with the strength and authority.”
Samson’s hair regrows during this process.
Chained to the pillars of their temple, he pulls them down—killing more than he had ever before. But the really powerful strike is against the Philistine deity. Samson becomes the Bible’s first “godkiller.”
For this momentous passage, he needed Delilah’s dark magic. She was the catalyst that unleashed his deeper abilities. Let Christians get started on the S&M! It’d be great for them! 🔶